Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [61]
“The door was locked when I got here,” Marv said. “The windows were secure. And the Norwegian gate was locked, too.”
Roelke made his way up the steep stairs. The attic was divided into two rooms—one front, one back. The front room was empty except for a row of lidded buckets probably used as mouse-proof storage, out of public view. The air smelled musty.
Roelke moved his flashlight beam carefully across the floor. A jumble of footprints marred the dust filming the floorboards, marking a clear trail from the stairs to the door of the back room.
“Are these your footprints?” Roelke called.
Marv trudged up the stairs. “Some of them are, from when I checked the place out earlier. Some could have come from an interpreter who came upstairs for some reason.”
Roelke squinted at the tracks again. There was no way to isolate any individual prints, but all of the tracks stopped at the door to the back room. He stopped there as well, splashing his light around the room. Empty.
Well, hunh. If an intruder with a flashlight was looking for something specific—say, Chloe’s missing antique bowl—he would have known from the doorway that it wasn’t there.
The two men clomped back downstairs. Roelke walked through the house again, considering the sequence of buzzing microphones. The side door from the porch to the storeroom provided the quickest access to the second story. But someone unfamiliar with the house would probably enter through the front door and circle through the lower story before finding the stairs. That matched the sequence Marv had heard.
“Can you think of any reason why an intruder would be interested in the second story?” he asked.
In the weird shadows cast by the flashlights, the security guard’s expression was hard. “No. And as far as I can tell, everything in the house is right where it’s supposed to be. But I read the incident report from the other day, when the new curator found the storage trailer open. I know Hank blew that off, but I didn’t like it.”
“Yeah. I didn’t like it either.” Roelke mentally shuffled facts into a row. Someone had left a lock open at the storage trailers—possibly in haste, or perhaps just uncaring. Someone had tried to break into Chloe’s house. Someone had now, it seemed, entered the Kvaale house after-hours.
As they left the old home, Roelke realized that his jaw muscles were beginning to ache from being clenched. He’d been wrong to discount Chloe’s instincts about an old woman’s fears and an antique gone missing. He pictured Chloe, thin and vulnerable and foolishly unafraid, and swallowed a growl. What in the hell had she stumbled into?
Removing the textiles to the church basement gave Chloe the wiggle room she needed to mount a thorough search of the trailers. She tackled one on Thursday and the second on Friday. She’d held out hope that Berget’s ale bowl was small, perhaps hiding behind other objects. No such luck. When the light began to fade on Friday she reluctantly admitted defeat.
She’d searched storage. She’d searched on site. Berget’s ale bowl was definitely, officially missing.
“Shit,” she muttered. What should she do about it? Report the bowl’s status to Ralph Petty, after he’d ordered her not to look for it?
Well, she’d figure that out later. It was time to call it a day. “And a week,” she added, tugging on the padlock to be sure the trailer was secure. “It’s the weekend. Normal people do normal things on weekends.” She was determined not to return until Monday morning. She had managed to finish summer staff training without further antagonizing Byron. She had managed to avoid Ralph Petty since their uncomfortable meeting. Better to leave while she was … if not ahead, then at least not in deeper doo.
As Chloe was uncoiling the chain on the restoration area’s security gate, headlights approached on Highway S. She pulled the gate open when she recognized Nika’s Chevette. Nika parked beside the trailers.
“You’re working late,” Chloe said, as Nika emerged from her car.
Nika shrugged. “You too.”
“Yes, but